


The Man With Eyes Like Polished Bone

by Pig_catapult



Category: Original Work
Genre: And some common squicks, Angst, Background lore in afterword, Body Horror, Drabble Series, Drabbles, F/M, Fantasy, Full content advisory in top notes, Gore, Here be dark themes, Horror, Medical Horror, Mystery, Post-Apocalypse, The first part originally stood alone, Transformation horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:40:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23680231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pig_catapult/pseuds/Pig_catapult
Summary: A man with eyes like discs of polished bone doesn't know who he is, or why he's trapped in a cell where a monster arrives to eat his flesh every time it rains, or why his body regenerates from any injury. When he gets the chance to escape, he doesn't ask any questions; he just runs, and starts on a painful road of self-discovery.His story is told in a series of 23 classic-style (exactly-100-word) drabbles, originally published in a one-per-day format on Pillowfort. Posted as a single chapter + afterword.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character, The Woman With Eyes Like Deep Water/The Man With Eyes Like Polished Bone





	1. The Man With Eyes Like Polished Bone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is heavy in dark and squicky themes. Here they are in alphabetical order:
> 
> Abduction, amnesia, ant attack, apocalypse in backstory is addressed, being repeatedly partially eaten by monsters, betrayal, body horror, burns, burrowing, character death, decapitation, dismemberment, experimentation, exploitation, gore, graphic injury, grief, imprisonment, insect death, medical horror, mold, murder, restraint, sensory deprivation, skeevy behavior, smoke suffocation, squishy textures, teeth, transformation horror, verbal abuse, victim blaming.
> 
> Please be assured that the skeevy behaviour does not, in itself, become a source of horror. This work has a mystery aspect, and the skeeviness is kept at the minimum necessary to not be wildly misleading.

1.

With eyes like discs of polished bone, he watches, waits, and weeps. Beneath the sound of pattered rain, something squelching creeps. It’s soft like soil, and up it coils, not worm nor slug nor snake. It’s back again, again, again, and its teeth are like a rake. He can’t recall what brought him here, or how he found this fate, but his flesh always grew back after it ate and ate and ate. He’s cold down to his bones and doesn’t think he’ll be warm ever again. But when the door one day opened, he ran and ran and ran.

* * *

2.

He’s free. He doesn’t think he can die. Every cut and scrape heals quickly. He doesn’t need to eat, but he ate the day before. Food was sweet on his tongue, and it made him feel warm for the first time in so long he almost couldn’t identify it. Every night he listens, from the highest place he can, for the awful squelch he knew. It moved slowly, but his prison had been small, and it squeezed its oozing bulk through bars enough to fill the room. The sun hurts, but the beast always came after dark. He keeps running.

* * *

3.

He doesn’t know who saved him. He doesn’t know if anyone did. When he’d healed enough to regain consciousness after the last attack, the door had simply been open. Had someone mistaken him for a corpse and fled? Had an earthquake broken the aging lock? He hadn’t stayed to examine it. The thought of going back, even to check, fills him with such dread that he resigns himself to never knowing. With how many things he can’t be sure of, what’s one more mystery? Every night he listens, but he hasn’t heard the beast again, not once. Still, he runs.

* * *

4.

It’s raining, and he is afraid. Every time he closes his eyes, he fears he might open them back in that dark, cold room, freedom only a dream. The rain is cold and every drop sinks exhaustion into his bones. He falls. When he wakes up, he’s in a room, and it is not dark. A woman with eyes like deep water offers him bread and fruit and speaks strange words. The warmth of food chases away the cold of rain. Later, he cringes away from her soapy sponge, but only until he learns what it’s like to feel clean.

* * *

5.

With the sticks and grime washed out, he finds out his hair is the color of old ivory. It’s long and terribly damaged from his captivity. She cuts it for him, shows him how to comb and braid what’s left. He still doesn’t understand her words, nor she his, but she lets him have the comb. She gives him clothes, and they are neither rotting away nor stiff with blood and sweat. He learns how to make bread, and she nibbles the soft sticky dough off his hands. Her lips and hands are warm, and soon, so is his face.

* * *

6.

Her hands are _warm_ when she holds his, and she starts to hold them often. Her lips are warm when she presses them to his skin. He thinks it’s strange, but he also likes it. At least, he does until she takes his hand and hers is cold and soft, like soil. He tries too late to pull away, and can only watch as her teeth grow forward through her dissolving lips. She sinks them into his shoulder and rakes away his skin. Her body squelches as she coils around him and her limbs begin to lose distinction. He screams.

* * *

7.

No-one hears him scream. For days, he’s trapped in the house with what used to be the woman with eyes like deep water. It’s smaller than the one in his first prison, hasn’t had the chance to grow fat on his regenerating flesh. It can’t fill the rooms of the woman’s small house, and the doors aren't locked, but his legs always regrow last, and it is ravenous. All he can do is crawl when he has enough of his arms or torso, reach for doorknobs when he has the height. Then he’s out, out, but not yet free.

* * *

8.

Outside, on the broken road, ants find him. The tickling bothers him more than the pain. He crushes the ones in his reach and lurches away, but some still scuttle away with tidbits of his flesh. That night, dozens of ant-sized beasts with rakelike mandibles come for him, and it takes three nights to smash all of them to mud. He digs the last from his guts under the morning sun, and it heats so fast he doesn’t know he’s thrown it until he sees the molten drop sputter against the gray asphalt. It cools into cloudy brown glass.

* * *

9.

The beast that once was a woman with eyes like deep water grows more ponderous every night. It takes longer to reach him, and not because he’s getting further every day. He knows now, why it retreats before sunup, and he has a plan. There’s an ancient tower, a rounded, cone-topped cylinder of a thing standing high on spindly legs, and he sees a ladder on it. A scrubby field surrounds it in all directions and its shadow moves throughout the day. Rung by rung, he drags himself up towards the top. He can’t remember feeling this brave before.

* * *

10.

The beast spends half the night now crossing the field and coiling up the ladder. It feasts, and it hurts, but then it has to pull its indolent body down and back. This time—this first, final time—it doesn’t make it all the way back before day breaks over the crumbling skyline. A cloud of steam hisses out of its moist body, punctuated by a series of bangs that send molten flecks spraying in all directions. The field catches. The smoke chokes him. When he can breathe again, the beast has been reduced to broken glass and charred meat.

* * *

11.

With legs again, he somberly makes his way back to the house. The fresh food has all spoiled, but the flour is still good and there’s coal enough. He washes himself, dresses in his surviving outfit, and packs bread and dried food and tools and soap into a bag. He wraps the comb she gave him in a small cloth, and begins to cry. He carefully nestles it beside the soaps. The only things left to do are take the woman’s plastic rain poncho, put the largest shard of her he could carry to rest beneath her garden, and mourn.

* * *

12.

Finding other people is out of the question, now. A thought gnaws at him almost as painfully as the beasts had, but thoughts don’t retreat from the burning light: What if he was locked up for a good reason? He can’t accept his own ignorance any longer, and there is only one place he can think of that might have answers. He needs to go back, back to that evil building where a huge beast not worm nor slug nor snake had come to feed on him every time it rained. He walks, and searches empty buildings for a mirror.

* * *

13.

For the first time in his memory, he really looks at the building that had once been his prison. Any signage is long gone and faded by now, but he knows it’s a pharmaceutical lab, and can imagine what it had looked like when it stood with gleaming windows and manicured hedges. It had been a place of awe, then dread, then captivity. Now it lay half collapsed and overtaken by green. He stays away from the shadows and holds a mirror pulled off a truck like the rare talisman that it is. Night approaches. He flees for high ground.

* * *

14.

His old cell is the last place he wants to visit, but the only place he’s sure he can investigate without getting buried in rubble. Listening for the telltale squelch becomes more important than breathing. The culmination of his dread waits for him in that room, filling every corner of it with crusty damp earth, but that’s all it is. He pries up one tooth with a long stick, and the enamel rake tine comes completely free, rooted to nothing. The beast fell apart without him, and—for no reason he can place—the thought draws out a bitter laugh.

* * *

15.

A path was worn by the beast across the floors, sanded over what he thought must be almost a hundred years, if it had been using that route for his whole memory. It led him through the butchering room right outside his prison, down a multi-story support pillar scraped down to its rebar, and eventually into a filthy office. The cherrywood desk is almost unrecognizable from mold and rot, but the file cabinets are intact, and there’s a photograph on the wall. He recognizes himself, in decadent reds and golds, standing beside a tuxedoed man with eyes like dark clouds.

* * *

16.

As he leaves through the remaining files, certain documents stand out to him: Receipts for expensive restaurants, sheaves of tests on different kinds of cells, plans for constructing his prison dated with numbers that devastate and yet mean nothing to him. News clippings of mysterious deaths and disappearances carry names that bring tears to his eyes, but he doesn’t recognize the faces in the pictures any more than he recognizes the man with eyes like dark clouds. Nowhere does he find anything about beasts or eating him, but the tests constantly reference dosages of cells and rates of tissue regeneration.

* * *

17.

Something changed. He _knows_ something had to have changed. What he’s become increasingly sure were his cells were being shipped all over the world. He’s found bottles with faded instructions to take a pill within 48 hours of physically contacting rainwater. He’s found smaller, older rake teeth scattered around rooms strewn with dirt. He searches through scores of crumbling files before he finds an incident report about an altercation between who he thinks is the man with eyes like dark clouds and a woman with a name that chills him like a raindrop on his neck. It’s his only lead.

* * *

18.

He avoids other people as much as he can, but when he can’t, he asks where he can find the woman. Eventually, someone understands him, and he awkwardly declines to join them by their fire. He heads north, and slowly he starts to see more signs that civilization is recovering from… whatever it was that happened. He couldn’t find any files about that and didn’t want to let on how naive he was by asking, but he’s sure that the world wasn’t like this before. He sees real roads, farms, and finally a city where a grand stone temple looms.

* * *

19.

The woman with eyes like quicksand takes no visitors before dark, and earthen guards wrench his mirror from him. She looks anything but pleased to see him, and demands to know why he was trespassing in her city. He tells her everything. She mocks him for forgetting what he is. She berates him for letting humans try to solve him. She insults him for a vapid lifestyle he can neither remember nor deny. She confesses to laying the curse that subverted his nature to destroy everything the man with eyes like dark clouds had built with a true miracle drug.

* * *

20.

No, she isn’t sorry. She wasn’t sorry when mass transformations upturned the world overnight. She isn’t sorry to have condemned him to a century of torture as a side effect. She’d do it again for the wider rule she’s secured since. She demands he apologise for walking among her subjects when the dust from his skin could cause an outbreak of beasts. He does, on his hands and knees, through sobs, and begs that she lift the curse. She relents, and then orders his decapitation. The floor turns to sucking mud, and he can’t rise before the machete comes down.

* * *

21.

He didn’t stay conscious long after that. No heart, no lungs. When he next wakes up, it’s pitch dark and he’s freezing. When he has limbs again, he feels his way around, and the heart-crushing realization he’s in another cell overwhelms him. Not again, he can’t do this again, not now that he knows the taste of fresh air and the warmth of being fed. He tries to find the door, but there isn’t one. Only the occasional muffled scream is proof that anything outside his cell exists. He weeps with relief when the trap door above him finally opens.

* * *

22.

The woman with eyes like quicksand tells him that he’s worthless. He thinks she means worthless _to her,_ but that isn’t what she says. She tells him she’d kill him if she could. She tells him she tried, one hundred years ago. She describes a myriad of ways she could do much worse. She mocks him for crying. She tells him that he is going to go very far away, and if he or any of his future followers or jailers so much as inconvenience her again, she will make him wish he’d stayed locked up with the beast forever.

* * *

23.

They cut off his head again, and plunge it in a plastic bucket full of rainwater. When he next wakes, he doesn’t know how much time has passed or where he is, only that the stars have moved. Ants are eating him. They don’t turn into beasts, and he’s found by a man with eyes like rye bread crust. None of the people in the town turn to beasts, either. It takes him some time to learn their language, but they’re welcoming and eager to teach. Life isn’t easy, but at long last he is free, and safe, and happy.


	2. Afterword

Hey, all. Thank you for reading The Man With Eyes Like Polished Bone. This is my first time doing a story as a series of drabbles, and I had a lot of fun. I like putting my characters through the wringer, but I’m also no big fan of downer endings, so I wanted to end on a hopeful note. The curse is lifted, and our protagonist is putting a life together somewhere new.

Between the format and the limited perspective, there are some details that I ended up leaving vague or unaddressed. I sat down around part 8 or 9 to hammer out my ideas and write down what was really going on, and that rambling wall of text at the bottom of my Google Doc informed the direction of the series from then on. But, since I didn’t actually work these into the text itself, consider this lore suggestions for your interpretation rather than hard canon:

The biggest thing I had to leave out is that, before he met the man with eyes like deep water and started letting his company run tests, the man with eyes like polished bone had been under the impression that he had the power of healing kisses and an aura that did similar over time. The skin cells in dust are addressed, but cheek epithelial cells constantly shedding into the saliva didn’t.

Open-mouthed kisses weren’t a line I was ready to cross with the woman with eyes like deep water. The fact it might have been misleading due to kisses also being a common infection vector didn’t really come into it. It was bad enough she was putting the moves on a guy she found passed out naked in the rain, whom she doesn’t share a language with, who didn’t know what a comb is; I didn’t want to bring a makeout scene into it. The kissing and hand-holding afterward was partially influenced by her turning. The pharmaceutical lab employees were similarly drawn to the cell cultures and pills they had access to, so it wasn’t a coincidence that so many of them were at work when they turned. The man with the eyes like dark clouds was the only one there with access to the prison, and the beasts retain routine and spatial reasoning but not much else. When the beast that used to be the man with eyes like dark clouds couldn’t find food in the place it had always found food, it just waited for food to start being there again. The beast that used to be the woman with eyes like deep water was able to pursue the man with eyes like polished bone because he wasn’t able to move far enough from the last place it fed fast enough.

The man with eyes like polished bone and the woman with eyes like quicksand are both fallen gods, but they’re in completely different power tiers. The gods are fallen because of an ancient, pantheon-wide curse that imposed power-nullifying weaknesses on all of them to limit the scopes of their dominion. Those weaknesses are all found in the natural world, and are proportionate to how badly that god needed to be nerfed. The woman with eyes like quicksand’s weakness is sunlight, and the man with eyes like polished bone’s weakness is, of course, the rain. The woman with eyes like quicksand had been a ruthless autocrat then, too, but before the nerf the man with eyes like polished bone was the miraculous healer equivalent of a slightly-fickle sugar baby, with kings and other gods competing for him to heal their armies and subjects.

When someone healed by the man with eyes like polished bone touches rainwater, the cells directly regenerated by his power slowly start to die. In the case of minor injuries to tissues with high cell turnover, this isn’t so big a deal and the immune system can handle it. In the case of major injuries or to low-turnover tissues like the heart, this can be very serious, and it would take another cell dose to refresh it. This could effectively bind people to him for a very long time and was the biggest limiting factor on his post-nerfing willingness to heal others. He liked saving lives, but wanting attention and nice stuff didn’t equal wanting to trap people in his service. This is also the reason the fully-grown beast died. It did rain, after all, and no-one has maintained that roof in a very long time.

The man with eyes like dark clouds drew him in with the promise of being able to help more people again without shackling them, but really wanted to mass produce that dependence. The individual cell cultures aren’t immortal once separated from the man with eyes like polished bone, and need to be reseeded periodically, but the primary reason for locking him up was to maintain a monopoly.

The man with eyes like polished bone’s cells also lose their power when cooked, so the bread would have been safe. The woman with eyes like deep water would have turned eventually because dust contains an alarming amount of skin cells, but doing it that way would have been even more misleading.

The woman with eyes like quicksand ran a few experiments of her own to see if pulling the same strategy as the man with eyes like dark clouds would be worth it. That’s why there was screaming. Ultimately, she decided that making her subjects dependent on a different (and significantly friendlier) god might come back to bite her in her autocratic tyrant ass.

I decided to go with “eyes like rye bread crusts” because making bread was the first post-amnesia thing he learned how to do for himself, so I wanted bread to symbolically represent safety and agency, in contrast to water representing danger and being trapped (the woman with eyes like deep water was a double-edged sword on the symbolism front, but he made the bread thing his own after her beast's death). I chose rye bread crust specifically because “bread crust” on its own doesn’t necessarily bring to mind an unambiguously natural human eye color. The man with eyes like rye bread crust has dark brown eyes.

Where the man with eyes like polished bone is at the end of the story is just a fresh start and new lease on life in a new environment. Post-apocalypse villages are just Not Easy by default. This is not meant as a didactic story and his new life isn’t meant as commentary on his cushier past.

The song that seeded the Pandora station I was listening to for much of the writing process was Across the Highlands by Kamelot. It was very loosely inspirational for the man with eyes like polished bone's initial predicament.


End file.
